National e-commerce retailers might have bemoaned the recent Supreme Court decision allowing states to require retailers to collect sales taxes on goods sold to people inside their borders, but that ruling provided a huge opportunity for Seattle’s Avalara.
The company rolled out Avalara Licensing Wednesday, a new service that helps retailers make sure they have the right licenses and registrations in states where they are now required to collect taxes. As of the moment, 27 states have enacted new tax laws that affect e-commerce retailers based in other states, and going through one-by-one to make sure you’re in compliance would be even more annoying than a test of a national emergency alert system.
Avalara will be happy to do that for you; for a fee, of course. For $99 per location, Avalara will find the forms you need to submit after giving the company some amount of information on your business, and for $349 per location, Avalara will also file those forms with the proper authorities and take care of any related costs.
“Like tax rates and rules, business licenses and tax registrations vary widely from state to state, and nuanced requirements are buried on government-managed web sites, making it difficult for sellers to check off the first task in becoming compliant with new taxing jurisdictions,” said Marshal Kushniruk, executive vice president of global business development at Avalara, in a release announcing the new service. Nobody is grumbling about these new laws at Avalara, however, which saw investors drive its stock up 30 percent in the immediate aftermath of the June ruling.
